Validic, a company that provides solutions in data connectivity to health care organizations, came to HIMMS this year with a new platform called Impact that takes a big step toward turning raw data into actionable alerts. I talked to Brian Carter, senior vice president of product at Validic, about the key contributions of Impact.
Routinely, I find companies that allow health-related monitoring in the home. Each one has a solution it’s marketing to doctors: a solution reminding patients to take their meds, monitoring vital signs for diabetes, monitoring vital signs for congestive heart failure, or something else fairly specific. These are usually integrated solutions that provide their own devices. The achievement of Validic, built through years of painstakingly learning the details of almost 400 different devices and how to extract their data, is to give the provider control over which device to use. Now a provider can contract with some application developer to create a monitoring solution for diabetes or whatever the provider is tracking, and then choose a device based on cost, quality, and suitability.
Validic’s Impact platform actually does many of the things that a third-party monitoring solution can do. But rather than trying to become a full solutions provider for such things as hospital readmissions, Validic augments existing care management systems by integrating its platform directly into the clinical workflow. With Impact, clinicians can draw conclusions directly from the data they collect to generate intelligent alerts.
For instance, a doctor can request that Impact sample data from a sensor at certain intervals and define a threshold (such as blood sugar levels) at which Impact contacts the doctor. Carter defines this service more as descriptive analytics than predictive analytics. However, Validic plans to increase the sophistication of its analysis to move more toward predictive analytics. Thus, they hope in the future not just to report when blood sugar hits a dangerous threshold, but to analyze a patient’s data over time and compare it to other patients to predict if and when his blood sugar will rise. They also hope to track the all too common tendency to abandon the use of consumer devices, and predict when a patient is likely to do so, allowing the doctor to intervene and offer encouragement to keep using the device.
Validic has evolved far beyond its original mission of connecting devices to health care providers and wellness organizations. This mission is still important, because device manufacturers are slow to adopt standards that would make such connections trivial to implement. Most devices still offer proprietary APIs, and even if they all settled on something such as FHIR, Carter says that the task of connecting each device would still require manual programming effort. “Instead of setting up connections to ten different devices, a hospital can connect to Validic once and get access to all ten.”
However, interconnection is slowly progressing, so Validic needs to move up the value chain. Furthermore, clinicians are slow to use the valuable information that devices in the home can offer, because they produce a flood of data that is hard to interpret. With Impact, they can derive some immediate benefit from device data, as the critical information is elevated above the noise while still being integrated into their health records. They can contract further with other application developers to run analytical services and integrate with their health records.